Certificates again...

I seem to be unable today to write anything without inadvertently pressing some key that sends off message before I complete them - so I shall try again from a text editor!

I recently installed SpamSieve and have been delighted with it, my spam count has dropped almost to zero! I used to get dozens a day but now I am surprised to see even one, and I have yet to see a false positive. But a brief question if I may and one which I did not see in the documentation.

I work in a classified field and most of my email is encrypted and signed, as is most of what I receive. I use Mail 3.2 on Leopard 10.5.2. Is the decryption process carried out BEFORE SpamSieve sees an incoming message? In other words, if someone were to encrypt some junk and send it to me, would SpamSieve be able to catch it as it would be decrypted by the time SpamSieve sees it? Or does SpamSieve see email in its encrypted form?

Thanks - Lawrence

No, SpamSieve works from the raw source of the message, as it was sent over the Internet. So it will not see the cleartext contents of encrypted messages.

It might be able to catch it based on the headers. (But, anyway, encrypted spam doesn’t really make sense: the sender would need to have your public key and know that you can read encrypted mail.)

Thanks for your response. I agree it does not make much sense to encrypt spam, but the originator could grab my public key and make life annoying for me. The originator would not need to sign any message, just encrypt it. But I guess you can tell if a message is encrypted and unsigned and dump it on that basis - which would work fine I think… Most encrypted messages are signed, and some plaintext also; sending an unsigned encrypted message is bad form anyway…

Lawrence